"We thought that this change was important for the industry, so that there was no conflict between J2EE 1.4 and the WS-I," said Ralph Galantine, group marketing manager for Java Web services at Sun.

Big-name J2EE vendors have added to the Web services tool menu as well. IBM has put out WSDL2Java and Java2WSDL, two tools that generate Java from WSDL and WSDL from Java, respectively.

JAX-RPC 2.0, a planned upgrade to a Java specification for use in Web services and remote procedure calls in Java, is getting a name change to JAX-WS, Sun Microsystems acknowledged on Wednesday.

"We thought that this change was important for the industry, so that there was no conflict between J2EE 1.4 and the WS-I," said Ralph Galantine, group marketing manager for Java Web services at Sun.

And Sun's Java-Web services union in gadgets has support from development-tool sellers Borland and Metrowerks, as well as from Motorola, Research in Motion, Oracle, Siemens and Symbian.